This is exciting news. I switched from Firefox to IE11 at home, and find that IE is as good as any other browser for regular web users today - this after using Firefox for almost 10 years.
I am also forced to use IE8 at work, as we are still using Windows XP - a non-software company is really really slow to upgrade their software - we were on IE6 till 2012.
As an aside, can someone let me know why IE11 still scores so low in http://html5test.com . Does this website test features which IE11 and future versions have refused to implement at all?
It varies by feature, but due to IE's long release cycle, it's generally about a year behind Firefox and Chrome on most things.
While basic sites work, some things just aren't possible to do in IE yet. For example, http://www.wavesurfer.fm/ works in every recent browser other than IE 11.
It varies by feature, but due to IE's long release cycle, it's generally about a year behind Firefox and Chrome on most things.
That's not entirely fair.
In terms of ticking boxes for new features, yes, IE certainly trails Firefox and Chrome by a few months, sometimes even a year or two.
On the other hand, when IE does claim to implement something, generally that implementation is fast, robust and stable. That certainly can't be said for Chrome or Firefox. Some obvious examples are the awful font rendering in Chrome (only just being fixed at the moment), lack of H.264 support for <video> elements in Firefox (still not fixed, just avoided on Windows with a workaround), and performance problems rendering SVGs that really undermine things like animations and using lots of SVG icons on a page in both browsers, just to pick three widely used recent features that all major browsers now claim to support.
While basic sites work, some things just aren't possible to do in IE yet.
That's very loaded terminology. Almost all real sites work just fine in any recent version of IE. The few that don't are mostly things like web design blogs and demos that push the bleeding edge because they want to.
Often these sites use features that aren't standardised yet and maybe still need browser prefixes to access the feature at all. These are exactly the kind of features that Chrome and Firefox tend to half-implement and then regress or change the spec several times over the next year or two before finally dropping the prefix. I doubt any professional web developer would actually use that kind of feature on a production site today unless they had very unusual requirements to meet. The example site you gave is another example of this.
In today world using any version of IE as a main browser is a bad idea. Why? Because browsers evolve very quickly and IE doesn't. It might look at first that IE is running quite nicely and even fast. But soon you start to notice all of the glitches. Especially if you're web developer. As long as there is no auto update, IE is always a threat for web developers as IE6 can happen again..
IE10 introduced auto-update. Once 11 came out, computers silently updated to it. No big windows update prompt asking them if they're sure they want it.
IE9 to IE10 was aggressively launched as well. I believe users got a basic prompt and IE turned on auto-updating by default. According to some of my users, IE10 just appeared, so my guess is that MS may have the prompt time-out to 'yes' instead of infinitely holding the computer.
Here in corporitstan, I had to put in extra blocks to keep 10 and 11 away, due to our CRM being suck on IE9 for the time being. Trust me, MS is trying real hard to get everyone to the newest version of IE.
You see I do understand that they try and I do applaud that. yet on my windows 8 machine I still haven't received IE11, even though I just recently did got a notice that IE has been updated, it is still IE10. To make matters worse even if I visit their website to download IE11 manually [1] they're telling me that I already have IE11.
So that experience alone tells me that not everything is done right yet. And even if everything would work, they have to keep doing things right for some time to regain trust.
IE11 didn't ship for Windows 8.0 it only shipped for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
Windows 8.1 is a free upgrade on Windows 8.0, more like a service pack release (when you look at the changes). Why not port it to Windows 8.0, it didn't make sense, 8.0 should fade out as people install the free upgrade that comes via Windows Updates (or the store, I forget which) and is a mandatory update. Opting out of mandatory updates means you opt out of associated upgrades.
This isn't a new or unique policy in Windows, look at iOS, you won't get WebGL on Mobile Safari without iOS 8, OSX doesn't back-port Safari and Andriod has a lot of versions with terrible browsers.
IE11 is supported on Windows 7 and 8.1, but not Windows 8.0. So on 8.0 the auto-update feature is ineffective. According to StatCounter only 5% of 8.0 users have updated to 8.1. There must be something blocking people there, not sure what it is, but end result is the auto-updater doesn't actually auto-update everyone and fragmentation gets worse.
Those modes fail testing. They're not replacements for the real browser. Helps with trivial things like formatting issues, but for the handful of things I've tested that work in 9 and break in 10, the legacy modes have largely the same issues.
Well, I am not a web developer - which is why I mentioned "regular web users".
Also, most of the WebGL demos around the net do not work in Firefox for me - it is possible that it is something to do with the installed drivers. However, they work perfectly work for me in IE.
I understood that. Yet you're here and you're familiar with IE6 situation. You know that while it might have looked like developers only ones who got hurt by that situation, actually everyone, including regular web users were hurt. As many hours were spent just to provide support for IE rather than creating something more useful. In other cases support for IE was dropped, which hurt users IE right away.
I provided developers view, so that you could see how regular web user choice makes an impact to the whole industry.
I highly recommend FireFox, Opera or Chrome instead of IE. IE is perennially around 2 years behind (or more) every other browser (overall - in places they are on a par - and very occasionally ahead).
IE 11 is evergreen, I believe. It's auto-update. So hopefully in the future, IE 6 won't happen again, except for those enterprise customers who turn off the auto-update.
Yes, but it doesn't work. It might be because people opt-out, they disable updates, or maybe IE is mostly used in corporate envs where people don't autoupdate anyway. I don't know WHY, but numbers show that it doesn't work.
IE11 has been released on October 2013 (8 months ago), but IE10 market share is still 6.77% today (compare with IE11 at 17.03%). I'm quoting NetMarketShare (but it doesn't really matter, all browser stats agree on this topic, with slightly different numbers).
For comparison, Chrome and Firefox versions usually go under 1% after no more than 4 months after a newer version has been released.
People who use IE are part of the problem, not the solution.
You're now part of a statistic that will be (sometimes wilfully) misinterpreted to force devs to support IE6-10 and to not support all the exciting technologies that IE doesn't support.
Please reconsider what you're doing, it's bad for the web ecosystem and therefore society in general.
I am also forced to use IE8 at work, as we are still using Windows XP - a non-software company is really really slow to upgrade their software - we were on IE6 till 2012.
As an aside, can someone let me know why IE11 still scores so low in http://html5test.com . Does this website test features which IE11 and future versions have refused to implement at all?